This is incredibly fascinating. If you are trying to figure out whether this is worth a read or not, I don't think you'll be disappointed spending an hour or two following along through the interview. For those of you that are tight on time, here are some heavily paraphrased notes I've been taking, referencing some of the more thought provoking parts of the interview. (And I'm only half way through! I'll need to finish reading this tomorrow):
- We should create human readable (memorable) hashes to map names to specific data, so people can trust the documents they have are not tampered with and so that such documents can't be removed from the public record. Sort of an immutable DNS system for data built on hashes. Readability is important so the keys can be transmitted independently of computer networks. Bitcoins may be a good reference technology for this. (See: "So this Bitcoin replacement" and passages leading up to that)
- We need secure, robust communication systems for medium sized groups of people (think revolutionaries) that don't need to rely on centralized (government owned) networks. Possibly use UDP to message someone (since without ACKs you can send to many hosts, and a listening host looks the same to the network as an unrelated host). More ideas about this in passage: "Right, so you send it to random internet hosts"
- The internet lets one hear their own beliefs echoed back with such force that it drowns out any other input. It reinforces (makes extreme?) the person's original thought. This creates a "radicalization of internet educated youth," makes us highly political.
- The US doesn't need to care as much about free speech since free speech won't change the fiscal outlook of those at the top (US is in a "rigid fiscalized structure"). China and Egypt are a more political society though, so they still need to control free speech. (See passage:"I am not going to say governments")
- "censorship is always cause for celebration. It is always an opportunity, because it reveals fear of reform. It means that the power position is so weak that you have got to care about what people think."
- Censorers don't care what information exists in darknets. They only care that their bosses don't find out about the darknets. (See: "Even the censors in China" passage)
- There is a second type of censorship beyond overt government censorship: "Censorship through complexity." Harkens back to the earlier discussion in the interview about the 'self-censorship' pyramid for journalists.
- Journalists should give all of their source data, not just choice quotes, so that people can make up their own minds. (See: "scientific journalism")
- "Most wars in the 20th century have started as a result of lies. Amplified and spread by the mainstream press. And you go, well that is a horrible circumstance, that is terrible that all these wars start with lies. And I say no, this is a tremendous opportunity, because it means that populations basically don't like wars and they have to be lied into it. And that means we can be truthed into peace."
And, since there seems to be interest in these notes, here are my paraphrased notes from the second half on the interview (once again, only including the parts I found especially thought-provoking):
- Systematic crime/injustice requires a paper trail. The threat of making documents public disrupts that paper trail, which causes mass ineficiency in an organization. ES: "So it's exactly your point, so that in order to kill six million Jews, you actually have to write it down." JA: "It's a big logistical process"
- "Fundamental justification [For Wikileaks] is that, there is really two. First of all, the human civilization, its good part, is based upon our full intellectual record, and our intellectual record should be as large as possible if humanity is to be as advanced as possible. The second is that in practice releasing information is positive to those engaged in acts that the public support and negative to those engaged in acts that the public does not support." [Ok, I don't really buy this. Small groups are just as capable as large groups of harbouring secret plans that the public is opposed to. Secrecy is a double edged sword for both those in power and those outside of it.]
- If you support these ideas, you should "give money to WikiLeaks [Laughter]". But seriously.
- "Courage is not the absence of fear. Only fools have no fear. Rather courage is the intellectual mastery of fear by understanding the true risks and opportunities of the situation"
- "because we all only live once, we all suffer the continuous risk of not having lived our life well. Every year. Every year that is not used is 100% wasted, it's not a risk of that, it is a dead bet"
- Assange's response to accusations that wikileaks causes harm, is interesting. See: "Up until Collateral Murder"
- Interesting aside about the purpose of the Pentagon's posturing, see: "WikiLeaks became the status quo"
- A great story straight from Firefly, episode "Our Dear Mrs. Reynolds" See dialogue after: "The woman from Catalonia"
- Leading through values instead of through command and control allows an organization like WikiLeaks to be better protected against two types of organizational attacks: infiltration and getting members plucked off (scared away?). This creates a P2P network of people instead of a classic client/server hierarchy.
- Wikileaks does premature redactions not because there is a "risk of producing harm as a result of disclosure", but because "there is a probable risk that if we don't engage in that sort of behaviour, our opponents will opportunistically attempt to distract from the revelations that we have published." Once again goes back to "controlling the story" conversations they had earlier. Interestingly, Assange failed to control the story w.r.t. rape allegations, and that is now what he and wikileaks is known for. Resulting discussion on the slippery slope of redaction is interesting. Assange would ideally like the source of the material to provide the redactions.
- "If it is true information we don't care where it comes from. Let people fight with the truth, and when the bodies are cleared there will be bullets of truth everywhere, that's fine"
- Lisa asks "How do you know if you've won?" JA: "... [insightful comments snipped]...I think we can make some significant advances and it is perhaps, it is the making of these advances and being involved in that struggle that is good for people. So the process is in part the end game. It's not just to get somewhere in the end, rather this process of people feeling that it is worthwhile to be involved in that sort of struggle, is in fact worthwhile for people."
There's a lot to think about here. Regardless of Assange's actual character, he has some amazing ideas. I think I may have a new answer to "If you could have dinner with one person in the world..."
I agree with many of Assange's positions, but I disagree on one fundamental position: anonymity.
Anonymity is where wikileaks breaks down. All of the lies and deception Julian speaks of are possible because there is no systemic transparency or accountability in the information ecosystem. All of those lies are abstraction events in the cognitive plane of existence and require action in the physical plane to manifest any outcome.
At the end of the day, I think people must step up to the plate and say, "no, this happening, it needs to stop and I am cosigning this information with my community identity on the line." At that point, a wise community should support that person through any life interruption or transition, if the individual cannot.
The thing about living a lie is that it is extraordinarily expensive to sustain or scale because the lie must defy nature and reality. The internet news information systems make it easy to proliferate small/trivial lies in/for a short period of time, but it makes any non-trivial lies much more expensive to sustain. People need more information, more transparency and more accountability.
If you have the accountability, you won't have the "boy crying wolf" problem at scale because of the individual cost of lying.
Ironically, one such platform exists and is six months into beta, but this community hell-banned it in week one. Think about how that will look, PG, in a couple of years. I have screenshots and the record won't be going away. nwzPaper is lean and will be here, it will continue getting better as an application and stronger as a community.
The fundamental flaw with an anonymity-structuree news information system as acknowledged by Assange:
"There is many ways for people to transmit anonymously. One of the greatest difficulties for sources is their proximity to the material. So if they have high proximity to it and it's a limited number of people know it. It actually doesn't matter what technical mechanism you then apply at the top. It would be quite difficult for them to evade scrutiny. And it doesn't matter what country or regime you are in."
"We need secure, robust communication systems for medium sized groups of people (think revolutionaries) that don't need to rely on centralized (government owned) networks. Possibly use UDP to message someone (since without ACKs you can send to many hosts, and a listening host looks the same to the network as an unrelated host). More ideas about this in passage: "Right, so you send it to random internet hosts"
This is why sender spoofing should also be considered a feature and not a flaw.
> We should create human readable (memorable) hashes to map names to specific data...
Can anyone elaborate on this? I don't quite get how the whole system could possibly be implemented. Also, it's been two years, are there any papers/projects related to the idea?
DNS converts something memorable to something arbitrary, but unfortunately it can be hijacked and all historical records can be removed, potentially burying the truth. What is needed is a global database that is mirrored automatically and cannot be overridden without an overwhelming consensus (ideally not at all, but a democratic barrier would be better than none), and even then the prior record should not be expunged, only overridden as in an append-only file.
Namecoin, for example, achieves this by leveraging Bitcoin's historical journal (in a separate blockchain):
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Namecoin
Namecoin and the system Assange is suggesting is unnecessary and highly complex, if it could be achieved and adopted to any meaningful level at all.
The obvious hammer for this nail is just a radically transparent information system with accountability for public information an individual contributes to the public record.
Search algorithms are, largely, a commodity code now. Before you argue otherwise, the complexity and proprietary nature only arises when you try to show preference to less desirable content before other content information consumers desire. Ie - advertising
Even with advertising in the mix, it is trivial for a search company to append a query score with its query results. With a transparent query score and a transparent algorithm, the community has a trustworthy third-party between the content producer and consumer.
Transparency and that includes the information source!!!
Comments
This is incredibly fascinating. If you are trying to figure out whether this is worth a read or not, I don't think you'll be disappointed spending an hour or two following along through the interview. For those of you that are tight on time, here are some heavily paraphrased notes I've been taking, referencing some of the more thought provoking parts of the interview. (And I'm only half way through! I'll need to finish reading this tomorrow):
- We should create human readable (memorable) hashes to map names to specific data, so people can trust the documents they have are not tampered with and so that such documents can't be removed from the public record. Sort of an immutable DNS system for data built on hashes. Readability is important so the keys can be transmitted independently of computer networks. Bitcoins may be a good reference technology for this. (See: "So this Bitcoin replacement" and passages leading up to that)
- We need secure, robust communication systems for medium sized groups of people (think revolutionaries) that don't need to rely on centralized (government owned) networks. Possibly use UDP to message someone (since without ACKs you can send to many hosts, and a listening host looks the same to the network as an unrelated host). More ideas about this in passage: "Right, so you send it to random internet hosts"
- The internet lets one hear their own beliefs echoed back with such force that it drowns out any other input. It reinforces (makes extreme?) the person's original thought. This creates a "radicalization of internet educated youth," makes us highly political.
- The US doesn't need to care as much about free speech since free speech won't change the fiscal outlook of those at the top (US is in a "rigid fiscalized structure"). China and Egypt are a more political society though, so they still need to control free speech. (See passage:"I am not going to say governments")
- "censorship is always cause for celebration. It is always an opportunity, because it reveals fear of reform. It means that the power position is so weak that you have got to care about what people think."
- Censorers don't care what information exists in darknets. They only care that their bosses don't find out about the darknets. (See: "Even the censors in China" passage)
- There is a second type of censorship beyond overt government censorship: "Censorship through complexity." Harkens back to the earlier discussion in the interview about the 'self-censorship' pyramid for journalists.
- Journalists should give all of their source data, not just choice quotes, so that people can make up their own minds. (See: "scientific journalism")
- "Most wars in the 20th century have started as a result of lies. Amplified and spread by the mainstream press. And you go, well that is a horrible circumstance, that is terrible that all these wars start with lies. And I say no, this is a tremendous opportunity, because it means that populations basically don't like wars and they have to be lied into it. And that means we can be truthed into peace."
And, since there seems to be interest in these notes, here are my paraphrased notes from the second half on the interview (once again, only including the parts I found especially thought-provoking):
- Systematic crime/injustice requires a paper trail. The threat of making documents public disrupts that paper trail, which causes mass ineficiency in an organization. ES: "So it's exactly your point, so that in order to kill six million Jews, you actually have to write it down." JA: "It's a big logistical process"
- "Fundamental justification [For Wikileaks] is that, there is really two. First of all, the human civilization, its good part, is based upon our full intellectual record, and our intellectual record should be as large as possible if humanity is to be as advanced as possible. The second is that in practice releasing information is positive to those engaged in acts that the public support and negative to those engaged in acts that the public does not support." [Ok, I don't really buy this. Small groups are just as capable as large groups of harbouring secret plans that the public is opposed to. Secrecy is a double edged sword for both those in power and those outside of it.]
- If you support these ideas, you should "give money to WikiLeaks [Laughter]". But seriously.
- "Courage is not the absence of fear. Only fools have no fear. Rather courage is the intellectual mastery of fear by understanding the true risks and opportunities of the situation"
- "because we all only live once, we all suffer the continuous risk of not having lived our life well. Every year. Every year that is not used is 100% wasted, it's not a risk of that, it is a dead bet"
- Assange's response to accusations that wikileaks causes harm, is interesting. See: "Up until Collateral Murder"
- Interesting aside about the purpose of the Pentagon's posturing, see: "WikiLeaks became the status quo"
- A great story straight from Firefly, episode "Our Dear Mrs. Reynolds" See dialogue after: "The woman from Catalonia"
- Leading through values instead of through command and control allows an organization like WikiLeaks to be better protected against two types of organizational attacks: infiltration and getting members plucked off (scared away?). This creates a P2P network of people instead of a classic client/server hierarchy.
- Wikileaks does premature redactions not because there is a "risk of producing harm as a result of disclosure", but because "there is a probable risk that if we don't engage in that sort of behaviour, our opponents will opportunistically attempt to distract from the revelations that we have published." Once again goes back to "controlling the story" conversations they had earlier. Interestingly, Assange failed to control the story w.r.t. rape allegations, and that is now what he and wikileaks is known for. Resulting discussion on the slippery slope of redaction is interesting. Assange would ideally like the source of the material to provide the redactions.
- "If it is true information we don't care where it comes from. Let people fight with the truth, and when the bodies are cleared there will be bullets of truth everywhere, that's fine"
- Lisa asks "How do you know if you've won?" JA: "... [insightful comments snipped]...I think we can make some significant advances and it is perhaps, it is the making of these advances and being involved in that struggle that is good for people. So the process is in part the end game. It's not just to get somewhere in the end, rather this process of people feeling that it is worthwhile to be involved in that sort of struggle, is in fact worthwhile for people."
There's a lot to think about here. Regardless of Assange's actual character, he has some amazing ideas. I think I may have a new answer to "If you could have dinner with one person in the world..."
I agree with many of Assange's positions, but I disagree on one fundamental position: anonymity.
Anonymity is where wikileaks breaks down. All of the lies and deception Julian speaks of are possible because there is no systemic transparency or accountability in the information ecosystem. All of those lies are abstraction events in the cognitive plane of existence and require action in the physical plane to manifest any outcome.
At the end of the day, I think people must step up to the plate and say, "no, this happening, it needs to stop and I am cosigning this information with my community identity on the line." At that point, a wise community should support that person through any life interruption or transition, if the individual cannot.
The thing about living a lie is that it is extraordinarily expensive to sustain or scale because the lie must defy nature and reality. The internet news information systems make it easy to proliferate small/trivial lies in/for a short period of time, but it makes any non-trivial lies much more expensive to sustain. People need more information, more transparency and more accountability.
If you have the accountability, you won't have the "boy crying wolf" problem at scale because of the individual cost of lying.
Ironically, one such platform exists and is six months into beta, but this community hell-banned it in week one. Think about how that will look, PG, in a couple of years. I have screenshots and the record won't be going away. nwzPaper is lean and will be here, it will continue getting better as an application and stronger as a community.
The fundamental flaw with an anonymity-structuree news information system as acknowledged by Assange:
"There is many ways for people to transmit anonymously. One of the greatest difficulties for sources is their proximity to the material. So if they have high proximity to it and it's a limited number of people know it. It actually doesn't matter what technical mechanism you then apply at the top. It would be quite difficult for them to evade scrutiny. And it doesn't matter what country or regime you are in."
"We need secure, robust communication systems for medium sized groups of people (think revolutionaries) that don't need to rely on centralized (government owned) networks. Possibly use UDP to message someone (since without ACKs you can send to many hosts, and a listening host looks the same to the network as an unrelated host). More ideas about this in passage: "Right, so you send it to random internet hosts"
This is why sender spoofing should also be considered a feature and not a flaw.
> We should create human readable (memorable) hashes to map names to specific data...
Can anyone elaborate on this? I don't quite get how the whole system could possibly be implemented. Also, it's been two years, are there any papers/projects related to the idea?
DNS converts something memorable to something arbitrary, but unfortunately it can be hijacked and all historical records can be removed, potentially burying the truth. What is needed is a global database that is mirrored automatically and cannot be overridden without an overwhelming consensus (ideally not at all, but a democratic barrier would be better than none), and even then the prior record should not be expunged, only overridden as in an append-only file.
Namecoin, for example, achieves this by leveraging Bitcoin's historical journal (in a separate blockchain): https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Namecoin
Namecoin and the system Assange is suggesting is unnecessary and highly complex, if it could be achieved and adopted to any meaningful level at all.
The obvious hammer for this nail is just a radically transparent information system with accountability for public information an individual contributes to the public record.
Search algorithms are, largely, a commodity code now. Before you argue otherwise, the complexity and proprietary nature only arises when you try to show preference to less desirable content before other content information consumers desire. Ie - advertising
Even with advertising in the mix, it is trivial for a search company to append a query score with its query results. With a transparent query score and a transparent algorithm, the community has a trustworthy third-party between the content producer and consumer.
Transparency and that includes the information source!!!